Louise Despont is a New York artist working with pencil and architectural stencils on paperwork.Despont’s work reminds me of geological & topological maps, architectural and botanical illustrations. The multi-pieced nature of the larger works, drawn with simple materials on old sheets of paper, lends a sense of authenticity and story that resonates those connections for me. When I first saw her work I imagined a work of restoration, a fragmented old journal painstakingly recombined to reveal a map or illustration of something familiar but unknown.
Unmappable – Denis Wood
https://vimeo.com/156776716
unmappable weaves together the life and work of iconoclastic psychogeographer and convicted sex offender, Denis Wood. Directed by Diane Hodson and Jasmine Luoma
My fight with maps, actually with cartography, was ignited by their rejection of modernism. As modernism was noisily turning its back on the failed rationalities, on the empty harmonies, on the make-believe coherences of Enlightenment, of Victorian thinking, cartography was clutching them ever more tightly to its breast. Painters may have been deconstructing pictorial space, composers shredding inherited tonalities, architects stripping walls of pilasters, cornices, and dentil moldings, poets following Pound’s cry to “Make it new”, and novelists indulging a self-consciousness that was all but the hallmark of the age, but cartographers, they were content to hone, to polish, to extend inherited forms.
Cartography exalted its unreflective empiricism as its raison d’être. It cherished the graphic conventions it had laid down in the 19th century. Even today, few maps acknowledge the 19th century’s over. This, despite the fact maps were never what they were claimed to be, never what the map themselves claimed to be: veridical and value-free pictures of reality. They were always arguments about the way the maps’ makers—or about the way those who paid the maps’ makers—thought the world should be.
With modernism came a predisposition for resistance and smashing traditional forms, for going someplace stripped down, someplace essential, someplace real, for asking, Why not? I long felt around for a new map that wasn’t of the same old subjects, that didn’t have the same old forms, that looked and felt modern. Schoenberg wanted to emancipate the dissonance. Arp wanted to destroy existing modes of making art. Fifty years later, I wanted to destroy the existing ways of making maps through which millions were subjugated, herded, and all too often killed. I wanted to emancipate dream and desire as subjects of the map.
Hard to do in geography: it was nearly as hidebound as cartography.
– Denis Wood, Mapping Deeply
Maya Lin’s Platform
Arctic Circle, Equator, and Latitude New York City are nested in three concentric circles in relationship to their geographic coordinates. The artist presents the surface topographies (mountain ranges, valleys, and oceans) of these latitudes but turns the outer layer of the planet upward making it viewable on a contiguous plain. Likewise, 74° West Meridian and 106° East Meridian visualize the longitudinal connection between seemingly far apart locations on the planet from the North to South Poles.
How humans experience and impact the landscape is of primary concern to Maya Lin, one of the foremost artists of our time whose ecologically inspired works exist at the intersection of art, architecture, and environmental science. Using technological methods to study and visualize the natural world, Lin takes macro and micro views of the Earth—via sonar resonance scans, and aerial and satellite mapping devices—and translates that information into expressive sculptures, drawings, and sited installations.
First map of the lithosphere.
Earth Dawn to Dusk
An animation of the topographic and Bathymetric data of the surface of the Earth with the Z axis (height) exaggerated by 100 times. The presence of a directional light source creating a sense of day and night as the sphere spins.
Terra Forming: Engineering the Sublime has been conceived by Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton. This project aims to change the way we think about the globe as a subject and an object, especially through the various cartographic projections we use to imagine it. A new projection has been generated that focusses attention on the dynamic relationship between the land and the sea and Factum Arte has made a cluster of five projections of the three-dimensional surface of the world without water. Each projection is based on high-resolution topographic and bathymetric data that is available in the public domain. These projections are a way of engaging with the Earth from different points of view, and reflect historical ways of mapping the world from the Greeks to Google Earth.
The data was prepared and routed in three dimensions into tonally gradated blocks of plaster each approximately 50 x 100 cm. The highest points are white, the lowest one black; in-between are a wide range of tones of grey. The Z axis (vertical dimension) has been exaggerated by 100 times in order to reveal an unfamiliar spiky terrain. This Z axis distortion was used because without it the globe’s surface would appear almost totally flat. The installation will mimic the passage of time as well as space by flooding the world with water over several days, until we reach current sea levels; the world will then be flooded completely, leaving us with a drowned world, a prescient image for those parts of the world facing rising sea levels, as well as those such as parts of the Arabian Peninsula which is trying to reclaim land from the sea. Each projection shows how, over time, the choices of particular worldviews were defined by specific social, cultural, political and ideological interests and beliefs. The ‘terra-centric’ projection is of its time with the Arabian Gulf near the centre as it was on maps from the Middle Ages. The North Pole is no longer stretched to infinity at the top not is Antarctica distorted at the bottom. The tradition of placing north at the top is a fairly recent invention: in many examples of early Arabic cartography south is at the top, in early Christian maps east is at the top. West is rarely at the top of the map because of its association with the setting sun and the onset of darkness—and death.
These projections will form part of an exhibition curated by Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton. Terra Forming: Engineering the Sublime presents a journey through time and space to see how our world has been imagined and built by artists and scientists, saints and cartographers. Terra-Forming will provide a creative response to the problem that has bedeviled creative minds for centuries: when faced with the staggering size and scale of the earth, how do we present a comprehensive view of the world without distorting it?
The Azimuthal Projection
This model evokes the medieval mappa-mundi dated c.1300 and which still hangs in Hereford Cathedral. It shows Jerusalem at the centre, the east at the top, and the Day of Judgment taking place beyond earthly time and space outside the map’s frame. During the routing of this object, the CNC device lost its bearings and cut through the bed of the machine. Our ability to control any intervention always has to take into account the tolerance in the system, system malfunction, unforeseen consequences and unpredictable events.
The Cordiform or “heart-shaped” Projection
Popular in the sixteenth century, it enabled those who drew on its design to incorporate the latest new discoveries by stretching the classical world map east and west. Martin Waldseemüller used elements of it on his 1507 map, the first to name America as a separate continent.
From Here to There
Questions, various pens and paper 10 ‘x 3’ 2 “Dimensions variable
A map of Manhattan composed of hand-drawn maps by various New York pedestrians whom the artist asked for directions.
Pretending to be a tourist by wearing a souvenir cap and carrying a shopping bag of Century 21, a major tourist shopping place, I ask various New York pedestrians to draw a map to direct me to another location. I connect and place these small maps based on actual geography in order to make Them function as parts of A Larger map.